The opening ceremonies of the 29th Olympiad in Beijing, China's triumphal and spectacular statement to the rest of the world, are over. We talk to eyewitnesses and a TV producer of former Olympic events. Also, Russia sends planes, tanks and troops to Georgia, and the first war crimes sentence amounts to time served.

FROM THIS EPISODE

The opening ceremonies of the 29th Olympiad in Beijing, China's triumphal and spectacular statement to the rest of the world, are over. We talk to eyewitnesses and a TV producer of former Olympic events. Also, Russia sends planes, tanks and troops to Georgia, and the first trial at Guantánamo Bay ends with a sentence that could be embarrassing to the Bush Administration.

Russia has sent troops and tanks into a breakaway region of Georgia, a former member of the Soviet Union. Interviewed on CNN, Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili declared, "We are freedom-loving nation that is right now under attack. This is really way too much. And if this thing is – if they get away with this in Georgia – the world will be in trouble." Fred Weir is correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Moscow.

A country once famous for shutting itself off from the rest of the world staged one of history's most elaborate pageants today: a four-hour extravaganza featuring 15,000 performers and 29,000 fireworks before a crowd of 91,000 people in Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium. The TV audience could be four billion worldwide. George W. Bush became the first US President to attend an Olympic event on foreign soil.

In America's first war-crimes trial since World War II, a six-officer military commission found Osama bin Laden's former driver guilty of supporting terrorism. The prosecution asked that same jury for a sentence of 30 years. Instead, it gave Salim Hamdan 66 months in prison…with credit for 61 already served. Carol Rosenberg is in Guantánamo Bay for the Miami Herald. Jonathan Mahler is author of the new book, The Challenge: Hamdan versus Rumsfeld.